Thursday, May 21, 2009

According to myth, a young George Washington confessed to cutting down a cherry tree by proclaiming, "I cannot tell a lie." The story is testament to how much respect Americans have for their cherished first president and honesty in general. Unfortunately, in the annals of history it seems there are 10 dishonest scoundrels for every honorable hero like Washington.

Supposedly, the truth can set you free. But for many, deceit holds the key to money, fame, revenge or power, and these prove all too tempting. In history, this has often resulted in elaborate hoaxes, perjuries, and forgeries that had enormous ripple effects.

In the following pages, we'll go over some of the most colossal and significant lies in history. Although such a list can't be comprehensive, we sought to include a variety of lies that influenced politics, science and even art. As a result of these, lives were lost, life-savings destroyed, legitimate research hampered and -- most of all -- faith in our fellow man shattered.

Without further ado, let's delve into one of the oldest and most successful lies on record.

The Trojan Horse

If all is fair in love and war, this might be the most forgivable of the big lies. When the Trojan Paris absconded with Helen, wife of the Spartan king, war exploded. It had been raging for 10 long years when the Trojans believed they had finally overcome the Greeks. Little did they know, the Greeks had another trick up their sleeves.

In a stroke of genius, the Greeks built an enormous wooden horse with a hollow belly in which men could hide. After the Greeks convinced their foes that this structure was a peace offering, the Trojans happily accepted it and brought the horse within their fortified city. That night, as the Trojans slept, Greeks hidden inside snuck out the trap door. Then, they proceeded to slaughter and decisively defeat the Trojans.

This was unquestionably one of the biggest and most successful tricks known to history -- that is, if it's true. Homer mentions the occurrence in "The Iliad," and Virgil extrapolates the story in "The Aeneid." Evidence suggests that Troy itself existed, giving some validity to Homer's tales, and scholars have long been investigating how historically accurate these details are. One theory behind the Trojan horse comes from historian Michael Wood, who proposes that it was merely a battering ram in the shape of a horse that infiltrated the city .

In any case, the story has won a permanent place in the Western imagination as a warning to beware of enemies bearing gifts.

Hans van Meegeren's Vermeer Forgeries

This lie resulted from a classic case of wanting to please the critics. Hans van Meegeren was an artist who felt underappreciated and thought he could trick art experts into admitting his genius.

In the early 20th century, scholars were squabbling about whether the great Vermeer had painted a series of works depicting biblical scenes. Van Meegeren pounced on this opportunity and set to work carefully forging one such disputed work, "The Disciples at Emmaus." With tireless attention to detail, he faked the cracks and aged hardness of a centuries-old painting. He intentionally played on the confirmation bias of critics who wanted to believe that Vermeer painted these scenes. It worked: Experts hailed the painting as authentic, and van Meegeren made out like a bandit producing and selling more fake Vermeers. Greed apparently overcame his desire for praise, as he decided not to out himself.

However, van Meegeren, who was working in the 1930s and '40s, made one major mistake. He sold a painting to a prominent member of the Nazi party in Germany. After the war, Allies considered him a conspirator for selling a "national treasure" to the enemy . In a curious change of events, van Meegeren had to paint for his freedom. In order to help prove that the painting was no national treasure, he forged another in the presence of authorities.

He escaped with a light sentence of one year in prison, but van Meegeren died of a heart attack two months after his trial.

Bernie Madoff's Ponzi Scheme

When Bernie Madoff admitted that his investment firm was "just one big lie," it was an understatement . In 2008, he confessed to having conned about $50 billion from investors who trusted him with their savings. Madoff used the formula of a Ponzi scheme to keep up the fraud for more than a decade.

This classic lie is named after the notorious Charles Ponzi, who used the ploy in the early 20th century. It works like this: A schemer promises investors great returns, but instead of investing the money, he keeps some for himself and uses the funds from new investments to pay off earlier investors.

Madoff may not have invented this lie, but he took it to new lengths. For one, he made a record amount of money from the scheme. But he was also able to keep it going much longer than most Ponzi schemers. Usually, the scam falls apart quickly because it requires the schemer to constantly find more and more investors. It was also an especially shocking lie because Madoff, as a former chairman of NASDAQ, had been an accomplished and respected expert in the financial field. Compare this to Chares Ponzi, who was a petty ex-con by the time he launched his scheme.

Anna Anderson, Alias Anastasia

With the onslaught of the Russian Revolution, the existence of a royal family was intolerable to the Bolsheviks. In 1918, they massacred the royal Romanov family -- Czar Nicholas II, his wife, son and four daughters -- to ensure that no legitimate heir could later resurface and rally the public for support.

Soon, rumors floated around that certain members of the royal family had escaped and survived. As one might expect, claimants came out of the woodwork. "Anna Anderson" was the most famous. In 1920, Anderson was admitted to a hospital after attempting suicide and confessed that she was Princess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the royal family. She stood out from other claimants because she held a certain resemblance to and surprising knowledge of the Russian family and life at court.

Although a few relatives and acquaintances who'd known Anastasia believed Anderson, most didn't. By 1927, an alleged former roommate of Anderson claimed that her name was Franziska Schanzkowska, not Anna and certainly not Anastasia . This didn't stop Anderson from indulging in celebrity and attempting to cash in on a royal inheritance. She ultimately lost her case in the legal proceedings that dragged on for decades, but she stuck to her story until her death in 1984. Years later, upon the discovery of what proved to be the remains of the royal family, DNA tests confirmed her to be a fake. In 2009, experts were able to finally confirm that all remains have been found and that no family member escaped execution in 1918 .

Titus Oates and the Plot to Kill Charles II

By the time he fabricated his notorious plot, Titus Oates already had a history of deception and general knavery. He'd been expelled from some of England's finest schools as well as the navy. Oates was even convicted of perjury and escaped imprisonment. But his biggest lie was still ahead of him.

Raised Protestant by an Anabaptist preacher, Oates entered Cambridge as a young man to study for Anglican orders. After misconduct got him dismissed from his Anglican post, he started associating with Catholic circles and feigned conversion . With the encouragement of fellow anti-Catholic Israel Tonge, Oates infiltrated enemy territory by entering a Catholic seminary. In fact, he entered two seminaries -- both of which expelled him. But it hardly mattered. By this time, he had gathered enough inside information and names to wreak enormous havoc.

In 1678, Oates concocted and pretended to uncover a plot in which the Jesuits were planning to murder King Charles II. The idea was that they wanted to replace Charles with his Catholic brother, James. What ensued was a three-year panic that fueled anti-Catholic sentiment and resulted in the executions of about 35 people .

After Charles died in 1685, James became king and had Oates tried for perjury. Oates was convicted, pilloried and imprisoned. He only spent a few years in jail, however, as the Glorious Revolution swept through England in 1688. Without James in power, Oates got off with a pardon and a pension.

Piltdown Man

After Charles Darwin published his revolutionary "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, scientists scrambled to find fossil evidence of extinct human ancestors. They sought these so-called "missing links" to fill in the gaps on the timeline of human evolution. When archaeologist Charles Dawson unearthed what he thought was a missing link in 1910, what he really found was one of the biggest hoaxes in history.

The discovery was the Piltdown man, pieces of a skull and jaw with molars located in the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England. Dawson brought his discovery to prominent paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward, who touted its authenticity to his dying day.

Although the discovery gained world renown, the lie behind Piltdown man slowly and steadily unraveled. In the ensuing decades, other major discoveries suggested Piltdown man didn't fit in the story of human evolution. By the 1950s, tests revealed that the skull was only 600 years old and the jaw came from an orangutan. Some knowledgeable person apparently manipulated these pieces, including filing down and staining the teeth.

The scientific world had been duped. So who was behind the fraud? Many suspects have surfaced, including Dawson himself. Today, most signs point to Martin A. C. Hinton, a museum volunteer at the time of the discovery. A trunk bearing his initials contained bones that were stained in exactly the same way the Piltdown fossils were. Perhaps he was out to embarrass his boss, Arthur Smith Woodward, who refused to give him a weekly salary.

The Dreyfus Affair

Like the conspiracy invented by Titus Oates, this scandal was built on a lie that dramatically affected national politics and was perpetuated for years by hatred. Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish officer in the French Army in the late 19th century when he was accused of a treasonous crime: selling military secrets to Germany.

After his highly publicized trial, authorities sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devils Island, and anti-Semitic groups used him as an example of unpatriotic Jews. However, suspicions arose that the incriminating letters were in fact forged and that a Maj. Esterhazy was the real culprit. When French authorities suppressed these accusations, the novelist Emile Zola stepped up to accuse the army of a vast cover-up.

The scandal exploded into a fight between so-called Dreyfusards, who wanted to see the case reopened, and anti-Dreyfusards, who didn't. On both sides, the debate became less about Dreyfus' innocence and more about the principle. During the dramatic 12-year controversy, many violent anti-Semitic riots broke out and political allegiances shifted as Dreyfusards called for reform.

After Maj. Hubert Joseph Henry admitted to forging key documents and committed suicide, a newly elected Cabinet finally reopened the case. The court found Dreyfus guilty again; however, he soon received a pardon from the president. A few years later, a civilian court of appeals found Dreyfus innocent, and he went on to have a distinguished army career and fought with honor in World War I. Meanwhile, the scandal had changed the face of politics in France.

Clinton&Lewinsky Affair

In January 1998, citizen journalist Matt Drudge reported a sensational story that turned out to be true. The president of the United States, Bill Clinton, had an affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. As suspicions mounted, Clinton publicly denied the allegations. As if this lie weren't big enough, it turned out that Clinton had lied under oath about the affair as well -- which was perjury and grounds for impeachment.

Here's how the truth came out. Paula Jones was an Arkansas state employee when then-governor Clinton allegedly propositioned her. She later sued him for sexual harassment. In an effort to prove that Clinton had a pattern of such behavior, lawyers set out to expose his sexual affairs. They found Linda Tripp, a former White House secretary and confidant of Lewinsky. Tripp recorded telephone conversations in which Lewinsky talked of her affair with Clinton. Lawyers then probed Clinton with specific questions and cornered him into denying the affair under oath.

During the highly publicized scandal, prosecutor Kenneth Starr subpoenaed Clinton, who finally admitted to the relationship. Based on Starr's report, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton for not only perjury but obstruction of justice. Despite the scandal, Clinton maintained relatively high approval ratings from the American public, and the Senate acquitted him of the charges. However, in the eyes of many Americans, his legacy remained tarnished.

Watergate

Two decades before the Clinton scandal, another U.S. president was caught in a web of lies, and the controversy had devastating effects on the country as a whole.

In the summer before President Richard Nixon's successful re-election to a second term, five men were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, housed in the Watergate Hotel. As details emerged over the next year, it became clear that officials close to Nixon gave the orders to the burglars, perhaps to plant wiretaps on the phones there. The question soon became about whether Nixon knew of, covered up or even ordered the break-in.

In response to mounting suspicions, Nixon denied allegations that he knew anything and proclaimed, "I am not a crook." This lie came back to haunt him. When it was revealed that private White House conversations about the matter were recorded, the investigative committee subpoenaed the tapes. Nixon's refusal on the basis of "executive privilege" brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that he had to relinquish the tapes.

The tapes were exactly the smoking gun needed to implicate Nixon in the cover-up of the scandal. They revealed that he obviously knew more about the matter than he claimed. Upon the initiation of impeachment proceedings, Nixon gave up and resigned from office. The scandal left a lasting scar on the American political scene and helped usher Washington outsider Jimmy Carter into the presidency a few years later.

The Big Lie: Nazi Propaganda

By the time Nazism arose in Germany in the 1930s, anti-Semitism was nothing new -- not by a long shot. The Jewish people had suffered a long history of prejudice and persecution. And although Nazis perpetuated centuries-old lies, this time those lies would have their most devastating effects. Like never before, anti-Semitism was manifested in a sweeping national policy known as "the Final Solution," which sought to eliminate Jews from the face of the Earth.

To accomplish this, Adolf Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, launched a massive campaign to convince the German people that the Jews were their enemies. Having taken over the press, they spread lies blaming Jews for all of Germany's problems, including the loss of World War I. One outrageous lie dating back to the Middle Ages claimed that Jews engaged in the ritual killings of Christian children and used their blood in the unleavened bread eaten at Passover .

Using Jews as the scapegoat, Hitler and his cronies orchestrated what they called "the big lie." This theory states that no matter how big the lie is (or more precisely, because it's so big), people will believe it if you repeat it enough. Everyone tells small lies, Hitler reasoned, but few have the guts to tell colossal lies . Because a big lie is so unlikely, people will come to accept it.

This world is rife with moral decay. Doubters need only look to the vacant church pews and surging Cracked readership for confirmation. That, and the fact that the porn industry utterly dominates all others.

Think we're exaggerating? We've got the numbers to back it up. As big as you think porn is, it's bigger, and its influence on modern society is deeper. As Jules Verne once said, "Some day, this whole thing is gonna be titties."

#6.Porn > Hollywood

The Long, Hard Facts

Hollywood cranks out around 500 movies a year to an international audience of 2.8 billion. Its closest competitor, India's Bollywood, makes about 1,000 movies a year, but 50 percent aren't released and 95 percent of those released are financial flops. This is unfortunate considering every Bollywood clip we've ever seen has been absolutely amazing.

In 2008, The Dark Knight alone grossed $533 million domestically and over $1 billion internationally, certifying it in the top five highest grossing films of all time and a crown jewel in the Hollywood empire. It's just further evidence that the institution of Hollywood cannot possibly be bested in any way, and certainly not by the data in the following paragraph.

The Moneyshot

As early as 2002, about 11,000 adult movies were released per year--more than 20 times the mainstream movie production. Of course, it's not really fair to compare them in that regard since Hollywood has to worry about dialogue, special effects and plot, while porn only requires a handcam, titties, and maybe a pizza delivery guy costume. To meet current demand, a new pornographic video is being created every 39 minutes in the U.S. We don't know if that includes filming Giada De Laurentiis handling zucchini, eggplants or eclairs for various shows, but it damn well should.

I'm not sure that eggplant is clean yet, Giada. Give it another quick rubdown, wouldya?

When it comes to cinematic preferences, people let their money do the talking. Since mainstream theater chains won't show The Crotchmen in wide release, we're forced to use other means of comparison. And every time, porn wins.

For example, in hotel chains that offer in-room X-rated content alongside major Hollywood releases, porn movie rentals represent 55 percent of the overall pay-per-view usage. Porn consistently generates more revenue than the hotels' mini-bars, though that probably wouldn't be the case if the hand-lotion was locked up in there too.

In 2005, there were approximately 425 films released in Hollywood, including a Star Wars prequel and a Harry Potter movie, with domestic grosses of $8.597 billion. That's very impressive. In 2006, the cumulative grosses for porn videos in the U.S., leveraging video sales, rentals, mobile phone content and Internet revenues--came out to....

Are you ready?

$8.65 billion.

About the same, and that's minus the billions Hollywood spends on promotion. Oh, and we're going to take a wild guess and say that the combined budgets of every porno shot that year wouldn't even pay for the CGI in the opening credits of a Harry Potter movie. So, yeah, we're thinking that $8.65 billion is pretty much all profit.

#5.Porn > Barack Obama

The Long, Hard Facts

In the digital age, there is no better snapshot of the zeitgeist than Web search trends. They allow you to view the ebb and flow of fads and news stories, as well as identify moments of hysteria:

If you examine top search trends in the U.S. over the last year an unsurprising amount of traffic was dedicated to coverage of the presidential election. We could have probably saved the electorate a lot of time by declaring Obama the winner when the search term "McCain" was trailing in popularity behind "American Idol," but apparently the constitution doesn't have those kinds of provisions.

The Moneyshot

Barack Obama was not only the front-runner for much of the presidential race, he garnered some attention as a "celebrity" along the way, particularly among the young people and internet users.

But it wasn't enough to make him number one. Most people just didn't feel they could fully absorb the nuances of presidential politics without rubbing one out first.

To illustrate this, we compared the volume of searches over the last year for "Sex" to those for "Obama" and "Iraq." We also added "Color Me Badd" because we thought it'd make them feel good just to be included, despite effectively serving as a statistical baseline:

Look a the poor red Obama line, looking like the ocean floor under blue sea of sex. It's no surprise, considering that in any given second, approximately 372 Internet users are typing "adult" search terms into search engines. Note the brief spike for Obama at point E up there. That's election day. It took a black man becoming leader of the free world to wrangle the collective consciousness away from sex for roughly 23 minutes.

#4. Porn > Diamonds

The Long, Hard Facts

To further illustrate how utterly porn dominates the internet, let's give you one more.

Domain names are to Internet commerce what location is to real estate. That's why corporate giants like Toys 'R' Us shelled out $5.1 million for Toys.com. The difference between toys.com and toysrus.com is the difference between a house in Hawaii and a house in Dipshit, Michigan.

We do apologize to the good people of Dipshit.

The Moneyshot

So toys.com, that's got to be the most expensive domain name ever, right?

Not even close. Not even the 1999 sale of business.com at $7.5 million (a record at the time) makes the top. No, topping them all is, you guessed it, Sex.com, at a jaw-dropping $14 million.

Courtesy of sex.com and porn.com, smut sits pretty in the top five most expensive domains, trumping the keyword-monsters diamonds.com and creditcards.com. One could even argue that diamonds.com likewise qualifies as porn, if the sensation of being vigorously boned in the wallet while browsing there counts.

#3.Porn + USA > Everybody Else

The Long, Hard Facts

If Michael Phelps demonstrated anything in the 2008 Olympics, it was that the United States Of America is pretty much the best at everything. OK, not so much education or health care or manufacturing things. But we rule at swimming. Oh, and internet porn. We produce more than anybody on the planet. Even adjusted for population, not even Japan can touch us.

Now, we know what you're saying: as a country we probably just produce more websites in general, and porn happens to be one variety. Not so. As early as 2003, Germany was producing 84.7 websites for every 1,000 members of their population to America's 63.7. In 2006, Israel was number one in the monthly hours spent on the Internet. Even Luxembourg, Germany, and Ireland lead in broadband penetration, a statistic so upsetting that we refuse to use it as a segue to a perfectly tuned dick joke.

And this is just a picture of Germany.

Things aren't looking much brighter going forward. China overtook us in total users by nearly 30 million in 2008 (of course, everyone knows the Chinese multiply by binary fission, so raw usage doesn't count). At least we're number one in is percentage of population using the Internet ... well, as long as you don't count Japan, Australia and Canada. That's right, we're losing the Internet war to our freaking hat.

The Moneyshot

America has produced the most pornographic webpages of any country, or any 10 countries for that matter. At last count, we were responsible for 244,661,900 pages of perversion. Our nearest neighbor in that respect is Germany with 10,030,200 pages, but given the depraved material they're renowned for one can safely assume most of those pages have only been visited once or twice.

But we probably just lead because we have a higher population, right? Wrong; based on the current U.S. population, there is approximately 0.8 porn pages per U.S. citizen, six times the average of Germany. And if you think we're stopping before it's a one to one ratio, don't forget that there's a little Michael Phelps in ALL of our pornographers.

#2.Porn > Productivity

The Long, Hard Facts

It is nearly impossible to quantify the effect that the desktop computer has had on production in modern business. Their capacity to automate, error-check, schedule tasks and intercommunicate are the very core of productivity. Even the inclusion of solitaire on most systems is vastly more efficient than breaking out a deck of cards and clearing the desk to play.

Three monitors, two towers and a laptop. Fuck you, procrastination.

The Moneyshot

There is no question that computers make our lives more efficient. After all, the staggering amount of pornography browsed at work probably cuts down on the time finding it at home significantly.

According to a 2008 Nielsen Online study, 25 percent of employees with internet connections use them to visit porn sites, which is up 23 percent from the previous year. M.J. McMahon, publisher of Adult Video News Online, further reports that hits on adult content peak during office hours. Its prevalence at work is blamed on the availability of non-subscription sites, a growing sentiment in the younger generation that pornography is not taboo, and those hydraulics on office chairs that let you ride low enough to facilitate covert wanking.

"Titties!"

It's not just a syndrome here in the Land of the Free (hand). Queen's University in Belfast conducted a survey of employees at 350 businesses in the U.S., U.K. and Australia for the porn-filtering firm SurfControl. Overall, 28 percent admitted to downloading sexually explicit content from the Web while on the job, though U.S. employees were slightly less likely to do so. Or they were smart enough to deny it.

The good news is you don't have to worry about that lagging work ethic hurting the economy. The porn industry employs about 12,000 people in California and pays over $36 million in taxes every year, so every clandestine tug is helping, really.

#1.Porn > Everything

The Long, Hard Facts

Remember at the beginning when we said as big as you think porn is, it's actually bigger? We meant it.

Microsoft, purveyor of the operating system used on most of the computers in the world, reported 2008 profits in excess of $16 billion. ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded company and number five on Forbes' top 2000 companies, posted 2008 profits of $40.6 billion. Though there is little in common with their industries, they do share one common bond: porn revenues spank them both, and then poop on their chest.

Secretly, Microsoft kind of enjoys it.

The Moneyshot

In 2006, the sum of international revenues from pornographic videos, sexual novelties, magazines, "dance" clubs, pay-per-view and Internet was approximately $97 billion.

Can you even wrap your mind around that number? Try it this way: that's larger than the combined annual revenues of the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball. Think about how many stadiums full of furiously masturbating people that is. Just don't think of it the next time you're at a game.

Still not impressed? Well, our domestic revenues for pornography are larger than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink combined.

This means $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography internationally every second. To put that in perspective, when ExxonMobil posted a quarterly profit of $11.7 billion last year, the largest in American history, they were effectively making $1,947 less per second than the world of filth mongers. Worse, Astroglide is water-based, so Exxon isn't even getting a cut of the lube commodities market.

When you start talking about money this big it's not even fair to compare individual companies, so we just made the jump to entire fucking countries. If you compare porn revenues to Gross Domestic Product, the market value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given year, it is bigger than Morocco. And with mobile porn estimated to grow to become a $3.3 billion business by 2011, it's only a matter of time before Kazakhstan goes down like...